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Tuesday, December 30, 2014

Who Is Talking About You? Google Alerts Will Tell You

I just saw on Facebook that a resume writing colleague had been quoted in an article in a major business magazine. She said she was alerted to it when she saw traffic on her Google Analytics report. But Google has an even better tool for letting you know when your name is in the news -- and it's free.

Google Alert is the easy way to monitor what is being
said about you online.

You
“register” certain keywords and phrases with Google and Google Alerts will send
you an email when there are new results with your search words and phrases.

If you
use quotation marks around a phrase, you’ll get alerts when the search matches
that exact phrase. If you don’t use quotation marks, you’ll get alerts that
include the words separately.

Note:
You may have to tweak the alerts if you’re getting too many or too few results.

Enter
each phrase into the Alert box:

Enter one
search term at a time. Don’t be concerned about upper or lower case — both will
be searched.

If you
are not logged into
your Google account, you can specify the email address you want to have alert
notifications sent to.

Click
“Show Options” to further customize your alerts:

How Often. You can choose to receive notifications
immediately (“as it happens,” once a day, or once a week.

Sources. You can choose to receive a notification
depending on where your search term shows up. For example, “Automatic” covers
any results found. You can also narrow the alert down to notifications when
your keyword phrase is found on Google News, blogs, web pages, video, books,
and/or discussions.

Language. Pretty self-explanatory. English is the
default.

Region. This refers to country. “Any region” is
the default.

How many. Your choices are “only the best results”
or “all results.” The default is “only the best results,” but you can tweak
this later if you’re not getting enough results.

If you
are logged into your Google alert, you’ll also be able to choose whether
notification emails are sent to your Google email account, or to a RSS feed
associated with your email account.

If you’re
logged into your Google account, once you select “Create Alert,” you will be
taken to a list of the alerts you’ve already created. If you click on the
“pencil” icon, you can modify the options related to that alert (i.e., change
your settings).

Once you
set up your alerts, you’ll receive emails (or RSS Feed notifications) when
results are found that match your criteria. At the bottom of the email, Google
will also give you links to Delete, Create, and Manage your alerts.

Read the
Google Search tips page to learn how to refine your search even further:

You may
find that you have to tweak and/or test your alerts for a little while before
they work the way that you want them to, but the results are worth it the first
time you receive an email notification about something that you didn’t know was
out there.